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Of scent and salsa

DJ Akbar Sami spiced up the launch of ITC'c Essenza Di Wills fragrances

PHOTO: SHAJU JOHN

WILL TO LURE Models display the Essenza di Wills perfumes.

You can listen to these tunes everywhere... in every taxi, every bus, every café and every nightclub across the country. According to DJ Akbar Sami, "Aashiq banaya", "Zara jhoom jhoom", "Jhalak dikhlaja" and "Somiye" are the top four on the Indipop American charts. Gone are the days when DJ were accused of living off the original composers by just adding a few beats to the good old tunes, getting some hot babes to do some naughty dancing and making tonnes of money.

Now it's official. Club versions are released with the original album. And everyone's happy. "Look at him (Himesh Reshammiya), he changed his style completely because of my remixes," says Sami, who played recently at Dublin, The Park Sheraton.

The event marked the launch of ITC'c Essenza Di Wills range of fragrances. The signature line, Inizio, has eau de perfume, eau de toilette and bath and body care products for both men and women. While oriental, woody and fruity fragrances have been chosen for men and floral, fruit and musk are the choices for women.

The promotional tour began with salsa lessons by Kaytee Namgyal. But the "shy Chennai-ites" preferred to hang over the railings and watch the ten or so couples who dared to salsa. It called for a change in strategy. "I skipped the Latin numbers I was going to start with as I figured they were not responding well," said Sami.

But the crowd (if the girls who kept falling down, and the guys who kept stamping on other's feet, and the overenthusiastic, who after the first salsa lesson, grabbed unsuspecting girls to twirl and dangerously dip them, was anything to go by) was responding well enough to R&B, hip-hop, and then to house. And of course, the celebrity DJ slipped in his hugely popular remixes for a long night of happy dancing.

Sami is getting a chance to show off his musical skills in two films, Reth, "a serious film that has a melodious, folk-based score" and Risk. "My song Jalwal, was the first to be remixed, and this was at a time when music companies had no clue about how it would do commercially."

MEERA MOHANTY

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